Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Book review

I read the book Vision in Elementary Mathematics by W.W Sawyer. I loved this book and felt that every teacher should read it who teaches mathematics to elementary or middle school students. This book was written awhile ago, but a lot of this information was very helpful.

The book started out by talking about odd and even numbers. There was a great explation and great pictures to go along with it. The most common example that could be used with elementary students is the one with the dots. For whatever number you have you create that many dots. Next you would create circles around the pairs of dots. If there are no more dots left you have an even number and if you have a dot remaining you have an odd number.

The author also talks about how in so many math classes you talk about conversions and the student actually has to do the math and figure out those conversions. The author says that most students don't remember what those different units area, for example, foot, inch, furlong, etc., the student only remembers how to convert those units. The author states that it would be better if those students could do those conversions but just have some basic ideas on what length those units actually are.

One of the problems they had in this book was dealing with a problem that invloved a man and two sons. They talked for many pages about this problem and how they could go about this. This was a very interesting problem to me because there were so many different ways you could look at the problem.

This book was a great read. I did feel that I had to read this book really fast in order to get through it for this class. Therefore, I will be going back and re-reading it while taking my time. That way I can learn even more!